sg contemporary culture
- nguan photography
- overutilised & fetishised chij uniforms
- kurt tay
- drop drop drop like grapes
- mak kau hijau
- insurance/credit card commercial featuring old grandparent alone n sad during festive season before the entire family suddenly shows up
Culture consists of many aspects of a particular social group:
1) Customs, social behaviours
2) Attitudes, Ideas
3) Aesthetics
Compared to our neighbours, SG has only existed independently for ~60 years. There aren't many traditions we claim as our own because-
Sep 2, 2024 · 5:19 AM UTC
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- film scene of family eating dinner: "爸。妈。吃。"
- cringing at The Noose
- haji lane kena gentrified
- cats at void decks
- bored go LAN
- being able to tell when someone went to an all-girls school, e.g. milotruckdreams
- gurmit singh still culturally relevant after decades
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most of these can be categorised into the themes of (1) nostalgia as a marketing &/or nationalistic strategy (2) sg as constantly changing thanks to endless (re)construction and thus our relationship with liminality and the land (3) discourses surrounding identity & ownership
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i think that Singapore contemp culture is one of perpetual emergence/formation and coming of age + contending with diff narratives (state-endorsed, microhistories/anecdotes, post-independence vs pre-independence, etc.) simultaneously, which is actually very representative of /+
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+/ the memory loss & instability intrinsic to colonial capitalism... notions of erasure, being in flux, disavowal, upheaval, false consciousness, double consciousness, etc. etc.
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this is clearest when you observe (yearning) attempts to locate a sense of belonging, in a city-state that keeps on tempering with or disrupting or policing or demarcating anything organic & stable that we try to cling onto as Truly Ours
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to me a hallmark of "culture" in Singapore is the continual tension/antagonism between (1) communities (2) the state (3) corporations, concurrent with a constant sense of amnesia & the need to start from scratch, cos any gains are quickly coopted/seized + silenced/renarrativised
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the fallback is always on childhood/family -- units that the state & capital are happy to endorse -- as stable grounds for return, so we're stuck in a loop unable 2 break free cos we're infantilised & beholden
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i don't believe in asking institutions for permission or funds or support to develop "culture". i think that that's paternalistic & panders to unaligned interests. "cultures" develop necessarily with tension/antagonism because cultures are discursive
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&& we have that! the difficulty is in memory retention + archiving, because the state/capital keeps taking our spaces, our movements, our organic expressions, etc.
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culture unfolds thru struggle & if struggle is constantly sanitised or censored we'll forever be left with the false impression that we have no culture when that's patently untrue
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i think that our cultural identity is found in the interactions between (1) Singapore being part of the Malay Peninsula in terms of indigeneity (2) Singapore being divorced from its indigenous roots w/ British colonialism, influx of migrants esp from China & India, (3) entry /+
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+/ into an industrial & post-industrial age of capitalism, which further removes Singapore from its ancient history, (4) global cosmopolitanism & Americanisation + Sinicisation, which embeds us into respective larger cultural mileus, (5) post-independence attempts to forge an /+
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